"After I had sent my package by the mail-rider, who passed Mr. Allen's house every other day, I thought my trouble would be easier to bear. But every day made it harder. I fell into a miserable torpid state, taking no interest in anything, and feeling only my misery acutely. I could not even pray for help, for prayer itself was a cross.
"Mother was very good to me; she gave me light, pleasant work to do, thinking to keep me busy. But however busy my hands were, my thoughts were free, and used their freedom to make me suffer.
"Father had been gone eight days, when one afternoon mother came in from the barn, where she had been to shake down some hay for the cows, with a face so sober that I was frightened at once.
"'Why, mother! what is the matter?' I cried.
"'I'm worried about your father, child,' she said, and then she went to the window and looked out.
"'Why, mother, if he started for home yesterday—'
"'He would be just in season to be caught in the snow,' she interrupted, with a vehemence unnatural to her.
"'Snow, mother!'
"I rose, and went to the window. The sky was full of great masses of gray clouds, that sometimes parted, and showed a steel-colored background, intense and cold, and immeasurably distant. Wide before us spread the waste, white, uninhabited fields,—the nearest house a mile away, and its chimney only visible above the hills which hid it. A tawny, brazen belt of light lying along the west, where the sun had gone down, illuminated the snow, and gave a weird character to the whole scene. There was a high wind swaying the tops of the tall trees before the house; and once in a while you would see a fragment of cloud caught from the great gray curtain, and torn into shreds, or ravelled into a thin web, which seemed for a moment to shut close down upon us. It was a strange night, a strange sky.
"I felt a vague alarm. But I tried to speak cheerfully. 'It is too cold to snow, mother!'